1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a digital signage playback system, a monitoring system, and a monitoring method thereof; more particularly, the present invention relates to a digital signage playback system, a monitoring system, and a monitoring method thereof capable of monitoring playback content of a digital signage in real time.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the advent of modern technology, digital signage has been widely applied in our daily lives, wherein users can obtain information from the digital signage. The digital signage can provide information such as videos, images, and texts at the same time. Because the modern network environment architecture has improved day by day, the playback of the digital signage has also been gradually changed, from outputting through a computer host associated with a monitor, to transmitting signals directly via a network and playing back the signals directly on a monitor through a comparatively low-price set-top-box. After the set-top-box receives a playbill from the network, the set-top-box can utilize push technology to reconstruct the playback content, lay-out, and schedule so as to play back on the monitor. The above method can lower the playback cost of the digital signage; however, in the above prior art method, the set-top-box can only perform one-way playback without providing a feedback mechanism; which means an administrator cannot be aware of the playback content from a control side only if the administrator watches the playback content in front of the monitor.
Therefore, in order to achieve a feedback mechanism, in known prior arts, the set-top-box has to return a displayed desktop to the control side on a real time basis. However, the digital signage usually contains both images and videos which might cause transmission problems. The images can be transmitted via such as a remote desktop protocol (RDP). For example, RDP can rapidly capture the displayed desktop and transmit it to a remote control side, therefore such method can provide fast and good-quality effect for the transmission of static images; however, for the transmission of dynamic videos, RDP has to keep updating the playback content, and thus intensively increasing the file transmission loading.
On the other hand, the known prior art has already been applied with video streaming service technology. The video streaming service can save the downloaded portion of the video into a buffer, and simultaneously read contents saved in the buffer for playback, so as to avoid the inconvenience of playing back the video after finishing downloading the entire video. However, if the entire desktop of the digital signage are treated as continuous videos and thus played back via the video streaming service, the fixed or static images or texts of the digital signage would cause waste of bandwidth.
Therefore, there is a need to provide a digital signage playback system, a monitoring system and a monitoring method thereof to mitigate and/or obviate the aforementioned problems.